Kampala Capital City Authority-KCCA has entered a Memorandum of Understanding with the Uganda Tourism Board to promote the Capital City as a key tourism destination for local and foreign tourists.
The KCCA Executive Director, Dorothy Kisaka, says that Kampala has a lot of tourism sites right from the authority headquarters, which can be marketed to attract tourists. She referred to the Mayor’s parlour, the historical and cultural diversity of Kampala which she says can attract tourists.
Kisaka further said they shall compile and disseminate tourism information for Kampala, and build capacity in the tourism human resource and infrastructure. The ED also talked about plans to set up a city forest that can be used as a recreational site.
The Chief Executive Officer of UTB, Lilly Ajarova says that the MoU shall enable the two agencies to improve the quality of services offered to tourists in Kampala. She says there are two types of tourism, leisure tourism and business tourism.
Leisure tourism involves entertainment while business tourism is largely concerned with meetings, conferences, and exhibitions. Ajarova says that Uganda has been deliberately bidding to host major conferences, meetings, and exhibitions and was in 2019 ranked the 6th best MICE -Meetings Incentive Conference and Events destination in Africa.
Ajarova says they shall work with KCCA to ensure that restaurants, hotels and other facilities attain a competitive quality to be able to attract business tourism. She says earnings from tourism dropped drastically with the invasion of COVID 19 and now, they want to recover through promoting local tourism and marketing Uganda to the International scene.
Tourism was the main foreign exchange earner and brought into the country over 1.6 US Dollars annually representing 7.7 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product-GDP. The sector created for Uganda 667,600 jobs with 77 per cent of whom occupied by youths between 18 to 30 years.
Last year, Uganda received 473,085 tourists compared to 1,542,620 tourist arrivals in 2019. Consequently, foreign exchange earnings fell to US$440 million representing a 72.7 per cent decline. UTB targets to increase tourism earnings to three billion US Dollars by the financial year 2024/2025. URN